Nuclear: Israel and the Historical Context

In the middle of the night on the 22nd of September 1979, an American satellite Vela 6911 registered an odd double flash. Tonight, it appears another nation has joined the nuclear club and has actually exploded a nuclear device. This right here is the unmistakable fingerprint of a nuclear explosion. But by 1979, nuclear tests like this were banned. Someone had chosen to break that pact with humanity to test in secret the world's deadliest weapon. Most of the evidence pointed to a joint test between Israel and aparite South Africa. The

Carter administration buried it and to this day it's never been officially acknowledged. Today the world prefers to watch Iran. Western media spins tales of doomsday bombs built in hidden bunkers by rogue Iranian scientists. But the Middle Eastern nuclear threat isn't in Iran. It's in Israel. Israel claims Iran will threaten rivals with nuclear weapons, but Israel has done that. They claim Iran will sell nuclear weapons to oppressive regimes, but Israel has done that. Israeli nuclear policy includes the Samson option, named after the biblical warrior Samson, who when captured by the

Philistines, tore down the pillars of the building where he was chained, killing himself and his enemies in one final act of destruction. Israel's Samson option vows that if it ever faces an immediate existential threat, it will destroy the entire region along with it, launching its nuclear arsenal indiscriminately. Israel's other nuclear policy is called strategic ambiguity, a diplomatic fiction, where it will neither confirm nor deny its nuclear assets. But it's well known that they possess about 90 to 200 nuclear warheads ready to fire. Israel is one of just five countries that

refuse to sign the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty. It refuses to allow in inspectors from the International Atomic Agency. Nine countries have nuclear weapons, but only one of them refuses to admit it. This is the story of how Israel got the bomb and how the world let it happen. Beginning in April of 1948, three Zionist militias, the Hagana, the Irun, and the Lei set loose Plan Dallet across Palestine. Plan Dallet called for the destruction of villages,

setting fire to, blowing up and planting mines in the debris, especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously. And the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state. The Zionist militias wanted as much land as possible with as few Palestinians on it as possible. One order read, "We saw a need to clean out the inner Galilee and to create a Jewish territorial continuity in the entire area of the upper Galilee in order to cause the tens of thousands of sulky Arabs who remained in the Galilee to flee.

This was an orchestrated campaign of expulsions and terror that destroyed 500 Palestinian villages and emptied 11 Palestinian cities, driving 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and farms to make way for a Jewish majority state that otherwise could not be assured. Today, 3 and 1/2 years after the sessation of active fighting, the Arabs are still crowded in camps in the countries surrounding Israel. The only acceptable solution of their problem is their immediate return to their former homes in Israel, now generally occupied by Jewish settlers. The

United Nations mandated that Israel let the Palestinian refugees return to their homes. Instead, Israel shot those that tried to return and seized their homes and property. One Israeli report from the 4th of December 1948 stated, "Successful shooting at Palestinians trying to return to the village of Blamea and who attempted to retrieve their belongings." David Bengurion, Israel's first prime minister and the architect, not only of the new state, but of the mass displacement that birthed it, had worked with the British Empire for decades and saw

how they controlled conquered populations. Just 10 years earlier, the British killed, injured, or exiled a sixth of the adult male Palestinian population to crush a revolt. Earlier in Gaza in 1917, and later in Iraq in the 1920s and 30s, the British used poison gas to break resistance. Bengurion understood a harsh truth. The Palestinians would never accept their dispossession. And so to secure his new state, he needed to use overwhelming force. what his rival once called an iron wall the natives cannot break through. In April of 1948, Bengurion wrote to an

operative in Europe to try and import scientists who could increase the capacity to kill masses. Many of Europe's greatest minds were talented Jewish scientists displaced by the Holocaust and David Bengurion invited them to Israel. But Israel did not have the capacity to go nuclear alone. It would need an ally and one old colonial power, its own empire crumbling, was ready to help. France by the early 1950s was terrified. The Second World War had wrecked the country and its colonial empire was unraveling from Vietnam to Algeria. French leaders believed

only the atomic bomb could guarantee their independence from the Americans and the Soviets. In the early 1950s, construction began on France's nuclear facility at Marul. France had the engineers and the industrial muscle for an atomic program, and they could still extract uranium from their African colonies, but it needed help with physics and especially advanced computing, where Israeli scientists excelled. Israelis became vital to the French nuclear weapons project and were the only foreigners with access to the Marul nuclear complex. France became Israel's primary

arm supplier. And as Arab independence movements swept through France's colonies in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, Israel provided intelligence to help crush them. At the United Nations, Israel voted alongside France to deny these nations their independence. David Bengurion advised Charles the Gaul to partition Algeria between the French settlers and the native people. This was in his words the only definitive solution to the Algerian problem. The Gaul referred to this plan as a French Israel in Africa. In 1956, France, Britain, and Israel conspired to invade

Egypt whose president Gaml Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal and was aiding the Algerian struggle for freedom. Israel struck first, launching a surprise invasion of the Sinai, slaughtering civilians in Gaza along the way and pushing deep into Egyptian territory. The following invasions by the French and the British, two exhausted colonial empires, failed, and international pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union forced the invaders to retreat, leaving behind thousands of dead Arabs. In the aftermath, the French prime minister Guy

Mole felt France owed the bomb to Israel. By 1958, Israel began to work on a nuclear complex in the Negv desert at Deona. The French agreed to build a 24 megawatt nuclear reactor. They could claim this was for peaceful research. But buried underground was the real prize, a secret sixstory chemical reprocessing plant. This was the real smoking gun. While a nuclear reactor can make energy, a reprocessing plant's only purpose is to turn the reactor spent fuel into weaponsgrade plutonium. That is how you build an atomic bomb. In February of 1960, as France's brutal war

in Algeria neared its bloody conclusion, France detonated its first nuclear bomb in Ran, Algeria, with a yield of more than 60 kilotons, four times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 20,000 m in the air above. American U2 spy planes were watching everything unfold and they noted that there in the desert alongside the French stood an Israeli scientific team. This was two nations sharing one nuclear test. Israel now had the blueprints to go nuclear. Since the Second World War, the United States had publicly opposed nuclear proliferation, the spread

of nuclear weapons to other countries. So, when reports began to trickle in of a strange facility being built in the Negv desert, it started to raise questions. The Israelis told President Eisenhower that it was just a textile factory. The Americans, still upset over Israel's secret military buildup before the 1956 Suez invasion, now kept a close eye on Israel with their U2 spy planes. What they saw in 1958 was clearly not a textile factory. It was a near carbon copy of the French nuclear plant at Marul. From above, the U2 pilots could see the outlines of what would later

be hidden underground. We saw enough to know that it was going to be a chemical reprocessing plant. When the CIA briefed President Eisenhower on the evidence of Israel's nuclear weapons program, he showed no interest and asked no questions. In December of 1960, a New York Times reporter, John Finny, met with John McCone, the chairman of the American Atomic Energy Commission. McCon was furious, telling Finny they lied to us. They told us it was a textile plant. The New York Times broke the story on the 19th of December 1960, 2 years after the U2 pilots first sounded the alarm. Bengurion dropped the textile plant lie, but claimed that

the Deona nuclear plant was only for peaceful purposes. Inside the American State Department, officials quietly admitted that Americans had most likely paid for the Deona plant. It is clear that they have constructed this plant through diversions from private and public aid to Israel. The Eisenhower administration ignored everything. In 1961, as Eisenhower left office, he told Congress that Israel has no plans for the production of atomic weapons. But privately during a transition meeting with the incoming Kennedy administration in January of 1961,

the Eisenhower team revealed that the Israelis were actively trying to produce weaponsgrade plutonium. President John F. Kennedy was much tougher on nuclear proliferation. In May of 1961, he met with Benorion, who now claimed that Deona was for desalination. The Egyptians next door were growing increasingly worried of Israel's nuclear potential. Kennedy began to demand regular inspections of Deona. Yearly American inspections began in 1962, but only on Israel's terms. American experts were kept away from key areas and were lied to about the reactor's purpose.

The Israelis even built a fake control room with displays outputting false readings to simulate a small 24 megawatt research reactor, which Israel claimed Deona was. The inspectors were told that they couldn't see the reactor's core for safety reasons. This kept them from noticing that the Deona reactor was running far hotter than Israel claimed. To hide the massive chemical reprocessing plant buried underground, the Israelis built fake walls and plastered over elevator doors to block access. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, left believing that the

Mona was just a standard research reactor, never suspecting what lay buried beneath. Years later, he stated vital information was withheld from him. No one had told him that years earlier, American YouTube pilots had photographed the construction of an underground chemical reprocessing plant. In the end, the inspections failed. By 1966, the Deona plant was complete and feeding plutonium into Israel's secret weapons program. On the 28th of May 1967, Israel secretly assembled two nuclear bombs came. Israel had just become a nuclear armed state. A week later, Israel launched a

surprise attack on Egypt, starting the six-day war. Although the temple bombs were never used, their existence was an insurance policy for the surprise attack. Two bombs weren't enough, though. Deona's plutonium was only a beginning. Building a true nuclear stockpile demanded more raw materials and more technology than Israel could ever produce on their own. In the 1960s, far from the desert of the negv in Pennsylvania, at the Apollo plant of Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, known simply as Nume, at least 200 to 300 kg of highlyenriched

uranium vanished. For years, this was covered up. But decades later, the classified documents and CIA testimony confirmed what many had long suspected. Israel had stolen it. Top Israeli intelligence agents, including Raphael Eton, famous for the capture of Adolf Ikeman, had visited Numeck under fake identities. By 1968, US intelligence had quietly noted a worrying detail. Traces of highlyenriched uranium bearing the unique Portsmouth signature from the US government's own Portsmouth gaseous diffusion plant that supplied NUMC had appeared at the Mona.

The issue was that Israelis didn't yet have the facilities to enrich uranium. The scandal was buried. As one nuclear official put it, it was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material. And yet, nobody wanted to find out what was going on. The search for the stolen uranium forced NUMC to exume radioactive waste burial pits in 1965. Obviously, the material wasn't there, but the cleanup of that operation is set to cost the American taxpayer $350 million. Stealing uranium was only the beginning. Israel didn't just need fuel. It needed hardware. During the 1980s,

one Israeli spy network known as a lam smuggled from the United States hundreds of kryons, which are tiny switches that ignite nuclear bombs. They were smuggled to Israel through a company owned by a lacam operative, Arnon Milchan, now a billionaire and famous Hollywood producer behind works like Pretty Woman and 12 Years a Slave. He is currently at the center of a massive bribery scandal with Benjamin Netanyahu. In the 1960s, Israel struggled to master centrifuge technology, the machinery used for uranium enrichment, until 1972 when Milchan's team bribed a German Ureno

employee to misplace the blueprints for advanced gas centrifuges temporarily in the vicinity of Milchan. Photographs of these designs suddenly appeared in Israel to boost its program. The same urko blueprints were stolen by Pakistan's AQ KN, which is why Israel and Pakistan's centuge designs are near identical. Israel's enrichment technology is also near identical to Iran's who bought Khan's blueprints. They are so similar that it is widely believed that Israel was able to test the stuckset virus on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran. The head of LAM in the 1980s,

Raphael Itan, was the handler for Jonathan Pollard, a US intelligence agent who sold 500,000 pages of classified American documents to Israel for years. He sold things like the codes to intercept American diplomatic communications. The classified information he stole eventually leaked to apartheid South Africa, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union. Polard now lives in Israel where he advocates for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. By the 1980s, Israel had everything it needed. Uranium triggers, centuge designs, and American state secrets. It

was about to get an even more powerful asset, total silence from the White House. Because after John F. Kennedy, no American president would ever try to stop Israel's nuclear program again. By 1968, CIA director Richard Helms informed President Lyndon B. Johnson that Israel had successfully built nuclear weapons and trained their pilots on how to drop them. But just as the Treaty of Non-prololiferation of nuclear weapons, the NPT, was being finalized, which was an agreement aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, the Johnson administration

decided to ignore Israel's nuclear program. If the Israeli bomb became public knowledge, the Arab states would most likely refuse to sign the treaty, a treaty designed to prevent exactly what Israel had just done. At this time, the Israelis were trying to buy Phantom jets from the US. These were nuclear capable jets. Some in the Johnson administration wanted to condition the sale on Israel signing the NPT. Johnson sided with the Israelis, telling his staff, "Sell them anything they want. Don't bother me with this anymore." In a 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon

and Israeli Prime Minister Golden, Nixon agreed the US would never again question the Israeli nuclear program. and inspections would stop. Prime Minister Mir agreed not to test a nuclear weapon, never to make their existence public, and to not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East, a phrase Israel still uses today. The United States had just gone from careless observer of the Israeli nuclear program to its enabler. Free from any restrictions, the Israelis began to produce as many nuclear weapons as possible. By 1973, Israel had built at least 20

nuclear weapons. After the 1967 war, Israel had conquered massive amounts of territory from its neighbors. Soon after, the UN passed resolution 242, which called for the return of the captured lands. Israel refused to comply. Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on October 6th, 1973 to retake lands lost in 1967. Israel's military was caught off guard. Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal while Syrian troops stormed across the Golan Heights, pushing deep into territory Israel had occupied. Israeli commanders panicked. Israeli Defense Minister Mosha Diane claimed this

is the end of the Third Temple. In Washington, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger held back on rushing arms to Israel, hoping that if the Arabs could regain some territory and some dignity, and Israel took a few hard hits, it might open the door to a permanent land for peace deal. Shaken by the massive losses, Prime Minister Golamir and her cabinet decided to ready their nuclear arsenal. If the Arabs advanced further, Israel would activate the Samson option, taking out the whole region. Missile launchers were put on standby and the F4 Phantom jets were reportedly loaded with nuclear

bombs with Cairo and Damascus in their sights. Israeli leaders made their nuclear preparations visible so that both the Americans and the Soviets watching overhead noticed. The Soviets likely passed a warning to their Egyptian and Syrian allies, which may help explain why the Syrian forces, who had advanced rapidly at first, suddenly slowed their offensive after October 7th. Henry Kissinger, who had coolly planned to let Israel take some hits so he could negotiate a peace treaty, suddenly flipped overnight. James Slesinger, then the American Secretary of Defense,

reported, "Kissinger just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical. The Israelis received an immediate and massive resupply of American weapons and ammunition." A month later, when Kissinger met Egyptian President Anar Sadat in Cairo, he admitted it was serious, more serious than you can imagine. France stopped supplying Israel with uranium after 1967. Israel's new partner in nuclear cooperation became a partite South Africa. In March of 1976, Shimon Perez visited South Africa and a month later, South Africa's prime minister Vorstster,

imprisoned during World War II for being a Nazi, visited Israel. Israel offered to sell the apartheid regime nuclearcapable Jericho missiles. Although the deal eventually collapsed because of the high cost. South Africa did however provide Israel with over 600 tons of yellow cake uranium in exchange for Israel helping them build their own nuclear weapons program. For years, Israel defied an international arms embargo to trade weapons with apartheid South Africa and trained their security forces on how to more efficiently brutalize an occupied population. The two regimes

shared not only arms but ideology. As one Israeli official stated, "They are also European settlers standing against a hostile world." 6 years later, during the night on the 22nd of September 1979, an American satellite named Vela 6911 detected something alarming off the coast of South Africa. A double flash, the unmistakable signature of a nuclear explosion. The Vela satellites had been orbiting Earth since the 1960s. designed specifically to detect violations of the 1963 partial test ban treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests above ground or underwater. As one insider

said, someone had let something off that the US didn't want anyone to know about. South Africa did not yet have nuclear warheads. The only nuclear capable state that had the motive and the ability to carry out a nuclear test was Israel. President Jimmy Carter convened an emergency meeting in the White House situation room. His diary entry for that day said there was indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa. Either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing. Carter's instincts weren't wrong. Three of the US Navy's

acoustic sensors on Ascension Island detected an explosion and the Naval Research Laboratory confirmed that it matched signals detected during earlier French nuclear tests in the Pacific. The radiation from the event erradiated sheep as far away as Australia. Leonard Weiss, a Senate nuclear adviser at the time, was briefed by intelligence agencies. He wrote, "The weight of the evidence that the Vela event was an Israeli nuclear test assisted by South Africa appears overwhelming. According to one Israeli source, it was the third such test in the region. The 2 kiloton detonation

was supposed to be masked by a passing storm, but a gap in the clouds allowed the Vela satellite to catch a brief glimpse. Acknowledging that this was an Israeli test was inconvenient. Elections were coming up. The Camp David Peace Accords had just been signed and Carter had built his presidency on nuclear arms control. If Israel's involvement was made public, it would force the administration to sanction Israel. So, the White House buried it. Privately, Carter knew the truth. In February of 1980, his diary noted the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean

near the southern end of Africa. Israel faced no consequences for violating the partial test ban treaty or the 1977 Glenn amendment which dictated that if a state detonates a nuclear device, they will be sanctioned. And so Israel's nuclear program only expanded. By the 2000s, it possessed nuclear weapons deliverable by American jets, by German submarines, and by Israeli missiles. Israeli nuclear policy today is guided by what is known as the Beagan doctrine named after Menachin Bean who led the Eargun militia that blew up the King David hotel in 1946 and massacred

the Palestinian populations of villages like Der Yasine in 1948. Bean called the massacre at Derine splendid and then he was voted prime minister of Israel. The Beagan doctrine is simple. Israel can have nuclear weapons, but no other state in the Middle East can. This doctrine came into action in June of 1981 when Israeli jets using American satellite imagery bombed Iraq's Osarak nuclear reactor. The strike destroyed the facility before it ever came online. It was the world's first attack on a nuclear reactor. The attack itself was controversial even

within Israel. The director of the MSAD and the head of military intelligence both opposed it, arguing that there was no concrete evidence that Iraq could even build a nuclear bomb. In 1986, Morai Venunu, a former nuclear technician at the Demona facility, leaked photographs and descriptions of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the London Sunday Times. Venounu's images revealed a massive underground plutonium plant. Through his bravery, the global community for the first time was able to estimate the sheer scale of Israel's arsenal. Around the world,

there were always rumors that Israel had a small, mostly antiquated atomic arsenal. But the Sunday Times report showed Israel had stockpiled dozens of sophisticated nuclear weapons. Venounu told the Sunday Times that he believed the Israeli nuclear stockpile totaled more than 200 warheads, 10 times what the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency estimated. Soon after the story was published, MSAD agents lured Venunu to Rome, drugged him, and smuggled him back to Israel. He was then tried in secret and spent over a decade in solitary confinement. Israel had built its nuclear arsenal

in secret with barely disguised American support and shattered the global effort to prevent nuclear proliferation. As one analyst put it, Israelis blazed a trail for the Pakistanis. Under US law, Israel's nuclear program should have triggered automatic sanctions. Pakistan was sanctioned in 1997 for its nuclear program. Taiwan was pressured to abandon theirs. Iraq was supposedly invaded for its WMDs. And now the US has bombed Iran to halt its nuclear program. All while Israel remains the largest ever recipient of American aid. In 2018, it was revealed that four consecutive US

presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump, wrote private letters to Israel that the US would never press the nuclear issue. Israel is now upgrading its facilities at the Mona and building more advanced nuclear delivery systems that can strike any city in the Middle East. publicly. The US still pretends it doesn't know Israel has nuclear weapons. Helen Thomas famously asked President Obama in 2009. Mr. President, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons with respect to nuclear weapons? Uh, you know,

I don't want to speculate. This was a lie directed at his own people to protect a foreign state. While Netanyahu has been claiming Iran is weeks away from a bomb for 30 years, Israel increasingly flaunts its nuclear might. In 2023, an Israeli politician called for dropping doomsday weapons on Gaza, declaring only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country's dignity. The Israeli heritage minister advocated for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Israel has grown increasingly erratic and violent as it has flattened Gaza, killed hundreds in the West Bank,

invaded Lebanon and Syria, and bombed Yemen, assassinated Iranian scientists, and now bombed Iran itself. Human rights groups and genocide scholars are calling Israel's campaign in Gaza genocide. While Netanyahu screams that no one will stop us, not the Hague. Netanyahu has said that Iran must face a credible nuclear threat. He stood in front of the Demona reactor and threatened that Israel can also wipe countries off the map. Iran has faced a nuclear threat for years. In a leaked email in 2015, Colin Powell wrote, "The Iranians can't use one, even if they finally make

it. The boys in Tran know Israel has 200, all targeted at Tran. Israel has already dropped several Hiroshima bombs worth of explosives on tiny Gaza. They clearly do not mind unleashing mass destruction. Israel's nuclear arsenal grows outside of any tree. It is beyond any inspections and world leaders ignore its obvious existence. Even though nuclear war is one of the things most humans place at the top of their list of fears. After Israel's 2014 war on Gaza, 18 Arab UN members pushed for Israel to sign the non-prololiferation treaty. It is the only state

in the region that hasn't. They also asked them to place their arsenal under IAEA inspection. They didn't ask for it to be dismantled. They simply asked for regular international law to be applied to Israel. There were 161 votes in favor and five against. Those five were the United States, Israel, Canada, Palao, and Micronisia. And this policy, this double standard puts everyone at risk. Nuclear proliferation is an existential threat to humanity. Iran's desire for nuclear weapons exists because there is already a nuclear threat in Israel. Worse still, Israel has not

only built its own bombs in secret, it has spread nuclear technology to other countries, fueling the nuclear proliferation it claims to fear. If the United States truly wanted peace, it would force Israel to the table, linking denuclearization to security guarantees and the end of the genocide against Palestinians. But that would mean addressing the truth. Israel's weapons by turning a blind eye to Israel's nuclear weapons while continuously arming Israel in violation of its own laws. The United States has signaled to the world that international law doesn't really

exist. Why would any nation follow the rules while Israel didn't and Iran was bombed despite allowing inspections and pursuing negotiations? This invites other nations to break the rules, threatening a future where every conflict risks going nuclear, or a repeat of an increasingly isolated Israel, spreading nuclear weapons to its allies, like it did with apartheite South Africa. Israel joining the non-prololiferation treaty and accepting inspections is the only way to build a nuclear-free Middle East, which has to become the goal. The only alternative is an arms race that

will doom millions of people. To understand just how close to midnight nuclear weapons can drag us, I really recommend watching Red Atoms. It is a fascinating series about the rise of the Soviet nuclear program. How it began as a promise of atomic powered communism and ended in catastrophe at Chernobyl. It's thoughtful and deeply researched. The kind of series that wouldn't survive on adriven platforms. That's why it's only on Nebula, an independent creatorowned streaming service where I and hundreds of other creators publish our work early, uncensored, adree,

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